Betty Ford

Betty Ford, the former First Lady of the United States who died on July 8 aged
93, exemplified the American virtue of positive thinking to overcome illness
and addiction, and used her experience of both to help others facing similar
predicaments.

As the wife of President Gerald Ford, she had been in the White House for only seven weeks when doctors found a tumour in her right breast. The next day she entertained Lady Bird Johnson at the LBJ Memorial Grove as though nothing were amiss, and then went into hospital, where a full mastectomy was performed.

"If you can't look happy," Betty Ford told visitors after the operation, "please go away." The attendant publicity – for the First Lady was eager that her condition should be widely publicised – caused a sudden increase in the number of women going for check-ups. "My illness," the First Lady concluded, "turned out to have a very special purpose – helping to save other lives, and I am grateful for what I was able to do."

As soon as she was out of hospital Betty Ford set her ebullient high spirits to the task of bringing cheerfulness back into the White House after the trauma of Watergate. Her unpredictability brought an air of spontaneity to even the dreariest official events: "I've spent too many years as me," she explained, "I can't suddenly turn into a princess."

Every time she passed one of the two small Greek goddesses in the Yellow Oval Room she would put a cigarette between the statue's fingers. Aesthetes were not amused, though, by the "earth tones" that she introduced into the Oval office, with plants to match.

On the national scene, she proved a doughty campaigner for women's causes, and worked hard to persuade recalcitrant states to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment Act. "Betty Ford is trying to press a second-rate manhood on American women," proclaimed her critics.

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At the same time – and perhaps not illogically – she piqued herself on her talent for bedroom diplomacy, working hard to persuade the President to place women in important posts. The appointments of Anne Armstrong as ambassador to Britain and of Carla Hills as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development met with her strong approval.

Betty Ford may also have exerted some influence over the President in the matter of President Nixon's pardon, which she stoutly supported. She remained a faithful friend of the Nixons, and paid a private visit to their fastness at San Clemente.

With her background in dance, she proved an enthusiastic supporter of the arts, focusing particularly on their value in sustaining the underprivileged and in breaking down racial prejudice. One of her proudest moments was the presentation of the Medal of Freedom to Martha Graham, who had been the inspiration of her youth.

Betty Ford needed no encouragement to trip the light fantastic, and posted a huge photograph in one of the White House offices of herself dancing with Cary Grant. "Eat your hearts out, girls," ran her subscription.

Under continuous pressure from engagements, she suggested that First Ladies should be salaried as official hostesses. But she did not repine. "I'm a manager," she declared, "I'm a director. I'm a person who likes to be in control."

Yet she put on an entirely convincing display of loving her husband. The Fords not only shared a bedroom in the White House (an arrangement which elicited letters accusing them of immorality); they even had the section separating the First Lady's and President's compartments on Air Force One torn down. She accompanied the President on many of his trips abroad, including his visit to China.

Sometimes, though, she was a political liability. Betty Ford was notably co-operative with the media, but her unguarded remarks could embarrass the President. Interviewed on 60 Minutes in August 1975, she was asked what she would do if her daughter Susan (then aged 18) confessed that she was having an affair. "Well, I wouldn't be surprised," the First Lady replied.

"I think she's a perfectly normal human being like all young girls. I would certainly counsel her and advise her on the subject, and I'd want to know pretty much about the young man – whether it was a worthwhile encounter or whether it was going to be one of those... She's pretty young to start affairs." "Nevertheless, old enough?" interjected the interviewer. "Oh yes, she's a big girl."

Had the Ford children tried marijuana? "Probably," Betty Ford replied. Would she have tried it herself when she was growing up? "Probably." What did she think of the Supreme Court's ruling allowing abortions? "The best thing in the world. A great, great decision."

These were straight, honest answers, but hardly calculated to prolong a Republican Presidency. Gerald Ford wrote in his memoirs, A Time To Heal, that the interview had rendered a challenge from Ronald Reagan for the Republican candidacy "inevitable". A cartoon suggested that the President might win the election if he didn't have to run against the First Lady.

Ford managed to see off the threat from Reagan but – notwithstanding campaign buttons urging voters to "Re-elect Betty's husband" – was beaten by Jimmy Carter in the presidential election.

The President having lost his voice in the campaign, it fell to the First Lady to read out the statement of concession. In public, at least, she took a typically cheerful view of the vicissitudes of politics. After all, she had remarked during the campaign, if her husband lost, she would get him back: "So I win either way."

It soon transpired, though, that the upbeat personality which Betty Ford presented to the world had been maintained only at considerable emotional cost.

She had been born Elizabeth Ann Bloomer in Chicago on April 8 1918, the daughter of a salesman for the Royal Rubber Company. Her two brothers were considerably older; as her mother put it, Betty "popped out of a bottle of champagne".

When she was two the family moved to Grand Rapids in Michigan, where she grew up a tomboy so fat that her mother hung a sign on her back: PLEASE DO NOT FEED THIS CHILD. She went to the Central High School in that town, and imbibed her mother's perfectionist philosophy: "Betty, it's better not to do it at all if you can't do it well."

The seminal moment in her childhood came when she attended her first dancing class at the age of eight. Before long she was dreaming of going to dancing school in New York.

Meanwhile, from the age of 14 she herself gave dancing lessons to local children; and at 16 and 17 she went to the Bennington School of Dance in Vermont, where she was taught by Martha Graham. The only cloud in an otherwise happy childhood was when her father accidentally killed himself by carbon monoxide poisoning.

An ambitious, self-confident girl, Betty Bloomer secured an invitation to Martha Graham's school in New York in 1938. She worked hard – taking jobs as a model during the day to keep the wolf from the door – but failed to win a place in the main group of dancers. So, in her own words, she became "the Martha Graham of Grand Rapids", starting her own dance group and teaching modern dance in a local school.

In 1942 she married Bill Warren, and for a while they lived at Syracuse, New York State, where he had a job with Continental Can and she worked on a production line in a frozen food factory. When they returned to Grand Rapids, she became fashion co-ordinator at Herpolsheimer's Department Store.

She was preparing to leave Warren when the news came through that he was in a diabetic coma. For two years she helped to nurse him, until he was fit to go back to work again. Then she started divorce proceedings, and settled for one dollar.

She met Gerald Ford, the best catch in Grand Rapids, in the autumn of 1947, and married him the next year. "He was late for our wedding," she would later remark. "He was out campaigning."

He remained out campaigning, or at least out politicking, for most of the next 30 years. Betty Ford, left to bring up three boys and a girl at Alexandria, Virginia, became plagued by self-doubt.

"I could never accept that people liked me for myself," she later recalled. "I was always self-conscious about my lack of education, that I didn't have a degree. I felt I was half the woman my mother was. I was always measuring myself against impossible ideals – altogether a good recipe for alcoholism, I'd say.

"When Jerry was away I'd have my five o'clock drink at a neighbour's house. I'd have another when I was fixing dinner and then, after the kids had gone to bed, I'd build myself a nightcap and unwind by watching television. Sure, I didn't drink in the morning, but as I got more honest with myself, I was able to remember occasions when I had put a tablespoon of vodka into my tea."

She did in fact give up drinking for two years at this time, but the pain from a pinched nerve in her neck did not help her resolve, and she became more and more dependent on sleeping pills. Her condition was not improved by Gerald Ford's appointment in 1965 as Senate Minority leader, which rendered him still more remote from his family.

Soon afterwards Betty Ford suffered a minor breakdown. "The collapse had been a long time building," she recorded in The Times of My Life (1979). "I'd felt as though I were doing everything for everyone else, and I was not getting any attention at all. I was so hurt that I'd think I'm going to get in the car, and I'm going to drive to the beach, and nobody's going to know where I am. I wanted them to worry about me."

With psychiatric help she recovered her equilibrium. Ford promised her that he would retire at the end of President Nixon's second term.

But when Vice-President Spiro Agnew was forced to resign in the face of charges that he had taken bribes from contractors while governor of Maryland, Nixon chose Ford as his replacement. The President cynically referred to the new Vice-President as his "insurance policy" against the threat of impeachment.

He was too sanguine; within 10 months Gerald Ford succeeded him as President. "I am indebted to no man and to only one woman, my dear wife Betty," Ford proclaimed in his first speech in the White House.

Adrenalin helped to keep Betty Ford going as First Lady, though only two months into her husband's presidency his press secretary recorded that tranquillisers and alcohol were failing to relax her sufficiently. And by the time she left the White House in January 1977 she herself admitted that she was "in trouble with pills".

Thereafter her decline was rapid. Later that year there were complaints about her "sloe-eyed, sleepy-tongued" performance when narrating The Nutcracker in Moscow for television. In March 1978 her daughter Susan decided that the time had come for an "intervention", and joined with the family doctor to confront her mother with the seriousness of her condition.

"It was brave of them," Betty Ford reflected, "but I wasn't in a mood to admire them for their courage." It took another, more formidable "intervention" – this time by the entire family – to bring the point home. Everyone in turn dilated upon occasions when the former First Lady had hurt them, embarrassed them and angered them with her drinking. "You're sick and you need help," her husband concluded.

At Long Beach Naval Hospital in May 1978 Betty Ford proved a difficult patient. She began by insisting on a private room (though she ended by sharing with three other women); refused for the first two weeks to admit she had any problem with alcohol or pills; and in group therapy hid behind the image of "former First Lady".

Gerald Ford, meanwhile, was forced to bear his cross. It was explained to him that he had contributed to his wife's problem by making excuses for her. Later he would give up drinking himself, and take up walking hand-in-hand with his wife.

Betty Ford emerged from hospital in a foul temper, and even 10 years later admitted to "feelings of anger or resentment or low self-esteem". On the credit side she stayed sober; and it was not in her character to win a battle on her own behalf without sharing the fruits with the world at large.

She toured the country with Leonard Firestone, the tyre millionaire, to raise the $5 million required to establish the Betty Ford Centre for the treatment of chemical dependence at Rancho Mirage, California. The Centre opened in 1982. The former First Lady acted as a hands-on president, giving regular lectures, and spending two or three days a week with the patients.

Celebrities flocked to the Centre – Elizabeth Taylor, Liza Minnelli, Robert Mitchum, Tony Curtis and many others. Betty Ford encouraged them to join in such chores as emptying rubbish bins and doing their own laundry. "They've been out there being treated as this very special person for years," she explained, "and yet, inwardly, they really want to be, for once in their lives, treated like normal human beings."

She insisted, though, that the clinic was for Americans from all walks of life, and campaigned for treatment on Medicare. The cost, in her eyes, was "very minimal" – though "very minimal" worked out at thousands of dollars for a four-week programme. "Clean and serene" was the Centre's motto, and it claimed a two-thirds success rate.

Betty Ford was hugely proud of its success. Her husband was only an ex-President, she would tease; she was an active one.

In 1987 she underwent quadruple coronary bypass surgery, from which she emerged with energy undimmed. In addition to her work at the Centre she raised money for the American Cancer Society, the National Arthritis Foundation and Aids research.

In 1987 she published Betty: A Glad Awakening, the story of her battle against alcoholism.